Alpha Testers Wanted: Static Void Games

As many of you probably know, I’ve been working on putting together a website that’s part game portal, part game programming tutorial collection, and geared towards indie java game developers of every experience level. Well, it's finally at a point where other people can try it out!

The point of the site is to give java game developers an easy way to put together a decent-looking website for their games, without worrying too much about web development or deployment issues. Simply upload your jar and some images, and the site automatically creates a page for your game containing an applet version, a webstart version, and a downloadable jar version. You can also rate games and offer feedback, so developers can learn what people like in a game.

The site also encourages users to upload source code along with their games, so other developers can learn from the games they play. In the near future I’m going to add a lot more tutorials, and I’m hoping to implement ad revenue sharing so that people can make money from the games they upload.

Ludum Dare is in the next couple weeks, which is a game programming contest where people have 48 hours to create a game- since that’s not always enough time to create a website to go with the game, I’m thinking that my site will come in handy for contests like that.

So before then, I’m hoping to get a few people from the forums to try the site out, let me know what doesn’t work, how things can be improved, etc. So if this sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love to hear your feedback!

Re: Alpha Testers Wanted: Static Void Games

Originally Posted by pbrockway2

The site looks good - well done, and all the best. I hope you don't strike any problems with hosting other people's code.

Thanks! I'm hoping that won't be a problem, since any code people upload will only be run client-side. Plus, other sites like this exist so I'm hoping that the approach has been vetted (self-evangelizing ahead- those other sites have less of a focus on indie gaming, open source, and tutorials). And if people think a game might be suspicious, they can always just run it as an applet to be safe.

But I'm quite new to the whole web side of things, so I could be very wrong. We'll see! At the very least, it's definitely been a learning experience.